the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

that is also self-consciously bound up in the economics and politics of the contemporary
Western liberal subject. This is apt for my particular intervention into these films since I
consistently speak of “we” throughout. The “we” here is partly composed of my own
corporeal relationship to the images and narratives, and so necessarily speaks of a personal,
intimate interaction with these films. However, it also speaks of the stationing of personal
spectatorial engagement within the larger frameworks of the development of the neo-liberal
subject. As stated above, many contemporary war films, and especially the latest cycle of war
on terror films, hail a certain spectator position, and inculcate a white middle class
subjectivity tied to notions of neo-liberalism and US exceptionalism. Hence, this “we” refers
to the attempted hailing and mobilisation of this imaginary neo-liberal subject by these films.
This immediately flies in the face of the commonly held idea, especially in Marxist and early
psychoanalytical film theory, that the spectator searches for self-identity and wholeness in the
“better than real” scenarios presented on the cinema screen. Shaviro instead asserts that
‘cinema seduces its viewers by mimetically exacerbating erotic tension’, in other words, we
can only stand by, looking on, in a state of tension, in ‘visual fascination.’ 111 Cinematic
spectatorship, is therefore an infatuation with loss of control.
This reveals crucial questions regarding cinema engaged with historical traumas and
masochistic spectatorship; is “trauma cinema”, in its attempts to ‘work through’ and ‘bridge
the gap’ in unprocessable experience, anti-masochistic spectatorship? Is the imposition of
causation and narrative on experience, the ‘realisation’ provided by cinema, in itself an act of
consummation and release of tension of precisely the form that masochistic spectatorship
strives to avoid? It seems that cinema (and specifically cinema that engages with historical
111 Ibid., 56
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